#i am not a violent person i say as i hide my non metaphorical bruised knucks

[gaiatheorist]

Daddy Issues.

The idea here was to write about ‘something else’, to clear my tangled mind of all of the hugely impactive peripheral issues floating in my atmosphere right now. It’s not going to work, and no quantity of “That is in the past.” or “I broke that cycle.” can blase-away the fact that a deeply dysfunctional development skewed my life into what it is now.

They and them, and this and that caused me to develop into what I am, an unemployed, 41 year old she-ish thing sitting typing into a knackered old Chromebook, with loads of keys missing, mainly on the left side, so I have to keep correcting typos, where I think I’ve hit the key with my dead hand, and it turns out I haven’t. That’s a literal observation, but also a fitting metaphor, a damaged person, using an unfit for purpose tool, to the best of their limited ability, in a tenacious-draining attempt to just keep functioning.

It’s not the ponies, and the foreign holidays, and the ‘stuff’, of course there’s a niggle that my eldest half-sister was given a house, and my younger one is undertaking her second degree at Oxford, interspersed with exotic holidays, when I’ve never even held a passport. I chose this path, I willingly elected to remove myself from their lives, I can’t resent them their indulgences, because I was the one who opted out of those spheres.  

There was no real drama to me ‘running away from home’ at the age of 18, no screaming rows and flouncing out, I’d been spending increasingly longer periods of time at the boyfriend’s house, one night in October 1995, I just didn’t ever go back home. He’d given me a Yale key, and told me the combination of outside-lights-on that mean his ex-girlfriend was there, and I ought to walk another lap around the block until she was gone. That’s a weird thing to remember, that if the outside light was left on, his ex was there to walk the dogs, and I was to stay out of sight, like dirty laundry. I was his rebound from her, they’d separated, after 11 years, in the July or August, I met him in the August, and I’d fully moved in by the October. For a few months, I was a shadow-thing, second-best, in hindsight, he might have held out hopes for a reconciliation with his ex, familiar ground and such, he always did prefer the easy option. I’m not easy.     

It wasn’t as ‘planned’ as the time I was going to leave sixth form, and take a job in a pharmacy in town, renting a room from a friend’s boyfriend. It wasn’t as dramatic as the time I was going to leave and live in my boyfriend’s grandma’s spare room, in the house where the gas and electric meters kept running out. My mother physically attacked me that time, screaming at me that I wasn’t taking THAT because she’d paid for it, dragging my clothes out of the bin-liners I was cramming them into, and tearing out a fair-sized chunk of my hair, when I just continued stuffing things back into bags. I needed to be out of there, for both of us, for all of us, we’ve since acknowledged that our respective ‘escapes’ from our fathers and families were more similar than either of us wanted to admit. We’re more different than we are similar, but, in a way, I also ‘jumped into bed with the first man that would have me.’ 

Her father was a monster. He was a paedophile, and he’s the grain of sand at the core of my oyster of not-telling, and not-asking-for-help. Why ask for help when there isn’t any, why change situations to protect others, when that takes away all of your own protection? I broke that cycle, I ‘saved’ my half sister and female cousins. Yes, I destroyed the family, but a family based on secrets and lies is worse than a fractured one. (Weird side-thought, I’m the only one of my siblings and cousins with a male child, I might have protected those girls, too, he’s dead, he died during his prison term, but his wife is still alive. If I hadn’t spoken out when I did there are at least five girl-children that might have been placed in his bed.) 

Her out-of-the-frying-pan was more obviously abusive. My father, not quite a monster, was violently unstable, and emotionally controlling. Bruises and scars fade in time, but the memories of emotional and psychological abuse are always there, temporal trip-wires, ready for the next trigger. My father, and her father, are the reasons I’ll never work in certain industries. Un-pretty-ing myself is a defensive mechanism, protecting me from some predators, and reducing the risk of being accused of being a try-hard slut, who will never be pretty, even under three inches of make-up. I’m content in combats and a ponytail, I don’t feel any need to paint myself pretty, but part of that links back to my father constantly berating and belittling any early attempts at femininity in me. I am clumsy, not graceful, and I’m never going to be a classic beauty, I accept these facts, but my non-binary, middle-ground ‘aesthetic’ rules out most customer-facing work. Cheers, Dad. 

Years of very hard work have enabled me to mostly disable my flinch-reflex. I’m one of the dead-behind-the-eyes types of abused children, rather than one of the hides-under-a-table types. My mother and father were both physically violent to my brother and I, so we learned the dead-response, our parents wanted the gratification of a reaction, and the two of us were already so emotionally messed up that denying the reaction was the only power-play we had. We would probably have had a lot less beatings and broken-things if we’d rolled over and showed our bellies, but we turned into resistant rock-children, unresponsive to the battering and berating, to frustrate our parents. Cheers, Dad, I can now stand face-to-face with violent and aggressive individuals, and keep my body language and tone of voice neutral. 

My father was unreliable, and unpredictable. When we still lived with him, there was no indication whether he would pick up his mandolin, and sing a nonsense-song with us, or backhand-slap us for no apparent reason. There were giddy-good times, but they were always tinged with the trepidation that we might do something bad, and set him off into a rage. We were never the reason for his rage, he was just mentally unstable, but that existence, coupled with the Catholic upbringing, caused behavioural shifts in my brother and I. He’s more ‘outward’, more hedonistic, more careless, he is more settled now, but for quite a long time, he lived a what’s-the-worst-that-can-happen sort of life, dangerous behaviours and risk-taking. I’m the other end of the spectrum, everything I ever do has to be risk-assessed to the nth degree, I’m incredibly self-limiting, and that probably has impacted on my mental health. (Piss off, well-meaning articles about the importance of an active social life, my Daddy Issues have really screwed up all of my human interaction.) 

Not wanting to ‘set off’ my father, and being hip-deep in the slurry of Catholic guilt complexes, I became a timid, invisible thing, so worried about being ‘caught’ and punished, constantly on-edge. That constant, all-encompassing paranoia tips your ‘normal’ anxiety response, being on-guard all the time for what other people might do to you doesn’t leave much energy spare for ‘yourself’. I never really built a sense of identity as a child, my adolescence was spent raising my half-sister, because I’d had the temerity to do away with my mother’s free childminders, so there wasn’t much time for exploration and development. I frustrate people-trying-to-help, when they ask me what I ‘enjoy’ doing, what I do ‘for myself’, because I can’t answer. Outside of a very strictly limited range of activities, I don’t know what makes me ‘happy.’ (I’ve just looked at Facebook, my younger half-sister is in Thailand, I’m sure she knows what makes her happy.)  Thanks, Dad, for having so much ego of your own that I skipped that step entirely, and became a different kind of doormat to my mother. That malleable need-to-please suits some people, but it never really sat easily with me. The little girls who grow up being told how nice and pretty they are seem to continue to seek that affirmation as women, it was something I’d never had, so I’ve never ‘missed’ it as such. I know I’m not ‘ugly’ or ‘stupid’, or any of the other things he called me, but that ‘cutting off’ behaviour is hard-wired, I don’t seek meaningful bonds with people because they might turn out to treat me like he did, and I piss people off with my ‘get the first one in’ self-deprecation. (Bored of telling professionals “I’m being facetious.” when I mock my disability and such.) 

My mother left him. I don’t know how many attempts she had made previously, but there were a lot of blood-and-snot-and-dufflecoats-over-pyjamas midnight car trips to stay with friends of hers for a few days. Children normalise events, ‘most’ people would be traumatised by those escape-flights, I suppose we were, until they became our ‘normal.’  I was seven, and my brother five, when we started having to sit very quietly in the waiting room of the solicitors. We looked at houses, and there was very little said about Dad not moving with us. She moved back to the village where her parents lived, and, for a little while, we were a single-parent-family, with Dad not paying the maintenance money on time, and either turning up, or not, to take my brother and I to his house at weekends. When he did bother to turn up, there were arguments, there never seemed to be any food in at his house, and he’d just bugger off and do his own thing all weekend, leaving my brother and I in the house. He started to lock us in after someone complained about us running feral, and he started to unplug the phone from the wall when we’d phone our mother to say he’d locked us in again. The overnight access stopped, there were more rows about the maintenance money, and we ended up going to the ‘Education Office’ for school uniforms, coats, and shoes, you could tell the other children in similar predicaments, because there were only two kinds of coat available, the better-off kids used to yell “Edjo!” at us. The lesson I learned from that was that people, in general, are untrustworthy. So I don’t trust people. There is always food in my house when I have my son here, and most of it isn’t the horrible cheap-tasting freezer-shop rubbish my mother used to buy, for convenience, because she worked long shifts, and because she was a genuinely awful cook. 

The single-parent-family thing lasted a couple of years. Mum-got-a-boyfriend before Dad-met-a-lady, with hindsight, they both reverted to pattern, she found a violent alcoholic, and he latched onto a quiet mouse of a thing, who wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouth full of it. My brother and I didn’t like the new man, we were already both damaged enough not to want to ‘bond’ with this stranger in double-denim who had moved into ‘our’ space. Our ‘normal’ wasn’t his ‘normal’, we had been raised in chaos and squalor, he had been raised by a mother with very exacting standards of behaviour and housekeeping. From the familiar, disordered squalor of living with a mother who vacuumed the downstairs carpets once a week, and was so lax with the laundry that we grew out of anything at the bottom of the laundry basket before it was washed, to new rules. Stupid rules, like slippers indoors, and dishes put away as soon as they were washed and dried. Those rules made no sense to us, because we’d never known them. We didn’t like him, and then he started hitting our Mum. He battered her, we’d been there before, we’d phone the police, and chase him out of the house, and lock the doors. (Back then, the police wouldn’t ‘interfere with a domestic’, but if they had a drunk and disorderly causing a public disturbance outside, they had to do something, my brother and I were street-smart.)   

She didn’t learn, one of the many reasons I don’t really have a relationship with her. We, her children, would try to protect her, because she wouldn’t protect herself. She always took him back. 

He battered my mother, he attacked my brother more than once, but never laid a hand on me. I like to play fierce on that one, to pretend he sensed the fire in me, but I suspect he just knew how the police would view him assaulting a young girl/woman. 

I couldn’t live there, with that, I made sporadic attempts to get out before I eventually did, and inherited a new ‘father’, whilst creating another.  Too fast, too young, too much, “I want to give you babies” was a line from a Pulp song we’d puppy-love say to each other. His reaction when I showed him the pregnancy test was the reason I only ever bore one. (Fairly certain that a student who passed through the school I used to work in was his daughter, though. That’s a different story.) 

I gained a functional-patriarchal father-in-law. Christ, we’ve butted heads over the years, we’re both obtuse. I’m stronger, and faster, and taller, and leaner than all of his various daughters, step-daughters, and daughters-in-law, he didn’t understand me, he didn’t try to, he tried to feed me cake, to make me soft, and compliant. Not my style.  He had some very rigid ideas of what females should, and should not do, we ‘should’ work in shops, or be nurses, and wear nice blouses, we ‘should not’ be capable of independent thought, or ever challenge the authority of a superior testicularly endowed person. You can imagine how that worked out, along with the “Here, lass, you can’t lift that, I’ll get it!”, and such. That was his way, and he was set in it, there was no point in me trying to change him, but my son has seen me tense and clenched-of-jaw enough times to know what I object to. 

My son. I made a child, and, in doing so, made my ex into a father, apparently ahead of his schedule, but my reproductive system is very badly damaged, I didn’t know if I’d ever conceive and carry again, so I took that one chance. I’ve reflected back frequently, over the last couple of days, since Fathers Day, about how the ex ‘parented’ our son. He didn’t. That was ‘my’ job, because he’d been raised to think so. Aside from the biological fact that I breast-fed the tit-limpet for a year and a day, and that my body was slowly recovering from childbirth, I can’t see a biological distinction to validate the weird division of everything. (I’ll gloss over the fact that I had such massive post-natal depression that I was hallucinating, and shaved my head, but continued zombie-ing on, with a forced smile, because ‘at least he is not ginger!’)  The ex “couldn’t” change nappies, because the wipes, the bags, and the nappy-tapes were “meant for women’s hands.” Obviously, he couldn’t breast-feed, but he didn’t pick up the midnight-screaming ‘grub’ either, he never learned the subtle differences in ‘hungry’, ‘wet’, ‘soiled’, and ‘attention, please’ cries, they were all just an elbow in my ribs until I made them stop, with my weird woman-magic. 

He didn’t like to handle ‘the grub’, he said he felt that the baby was too small, too fragile, for his man-hands. I may as well have existed in the 1950s, where children were strapped to the woman until school-age. (There’s a ‘Dinosaurs’ aside, the boy didn’t call him ‘Dad’ for years, we were ‘Mum’, and ‘My Mum.’) He was a Saturday-Dad, except Saturdays were band-days, I worked on Sundays, so, after Sunday lunch at the in-laws, he’d take the small one to the park in town, where he said he “Felt like one of those Dads with weekend access.”, hmm, I wonder how you could change that? As the boy grew, nothing much changed, I was responsible for him, and the house, and the ex. The ex was ‘emotionally absent’, some computer game, some TV show, some band practice, he never taught the child to ride a bike, or lace a pair of boots, because he was always ‘busy’, or ‘tired’. I have taught the boy many, many things, but it hurt my heart a little to have to ask the ex to show him how to shave, that’s something I couldn’t teach him. 

I have had some incredibly bad examples of fathering, and I married a man who didn’t fancy getting involved with the process. Fathers Day is awkward for me, because I can’t join in on the love-fest. I have Daddy Issues.